Neuroscience Evidence for Economic Humanism in Management Science: Organizational Implications and Strategy.

Globalization phenomena and Information Communication Technology (ICT) are producing deep changes worldwide. The economic environment and society where firms both cooperate and compete with each other are rapidly changing leading firms towards recognizing the role of intangible resources as a source of fresh competitive advantage. Experience, innovation and the ability to create new knowledge completely arise from the act of human resources inviting firms to focus on how to generate and shape knowledge. Therefore, the future of firms depends greatly on how managers are able to explore and exploit human resources. However, without a clear understanding of the nature of human beings and the complexity behind human interactions, we cannot understand the theory of organizational knowledge creation. Thus, how can firms discover, manage and valorize this "human advantage"? Neuroscience can increase the understanding of how cognitive and emotional processes work; in doing so, we may be able to better understand how individuals involved in a business organization make decisions and how external factors influence their behavior, especially in terms of commitment activation and engagement level. In this respect, a neuroscientific approach to business can support managers in decision-making processes. In a scenario where economic humanism plays a central role in the process of fostering firms' competitiveness and emerging strategies, we believe that a neuroscience approach in a business organization could be a valid source of value and inspiration for manager decision-making processes.

Visual attention and memory in professional traders.

Professional traders need to process a large amount of visual information in their daily activity to judge how risky it is to trade specific investment products. Despite some studies investigating the effects of display clutter on traders, visual attention and memory were never investigated in controlled experimental tasks in this population. Following a preliminary study with 30 participants, visual selective attention and visual working memory were measured and compared between two groups of 15 traders and 15 non-traders (salespeople, acting as a control group) from a large-scale banking group in three experimental tasks measuring selective attention in complex visual contexts, simulating display clutter situations (Visual search), cognitive interference (Stroop task), and a delayed recall visual working memory task. In the Visual search task, traders displayed faster response times (RTs) than non-traders for small display sets, while their performance overlapped for large sets. In the Stroop task, traders showed faster RTs than non-traders but were nevertheless affected by cognitive interference. The memory task highlighted no significant differences between the groups. Therefore, this study found an advantage in traders' attention when processing visual information in small sets with no retention. This result could influence trading activity-determining an immediate use of relevant visual information in decision making-and traders' display layout organization.

Mindfulness-based online intervention increases well-being and decreases stress after Covid-19 lockdown.

Mindfulness interventions were shown to be effective in improving well-being and reducing perceived stress in several conditions. These effects were also found in online mindfulness-based training, especially in employees in organizational environments. The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of an online mindfulness intervention on healthy employees, especially after the first Italian Covid-19 lockdown. Participants in the intervention group underwent an 8-week mindfulness online training program based on the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol compared to a control (no-intervention) group. All participants filled in weekly surveys for the whole intervention duration via online questionnaires to measure their habits, mindfulness (FFMQ-15), emotion regulation (ERQ), positive and negative affect (PANAS), depression, anxiety and stress (DASS-21), resilience (RSA) and insomnia (ISI). 69 participants in the intervention group and 63 in the no-treatment control group were considered in the longitudinal analyses. We found significant differences between the intervention and control groups over time in the measures of mindfulness (in particular the nonreactivity subscale), positive affect, depression, and insomnia. Moreover, we found that the frequency of practice and ease perceived in practicing were positively correlated to several indices of well-being (mindfulness, positive affect, cognitive reappraisal) and negatively correlated to several indices of stress (negative affect, depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, expressive suppression). These results show the importance and effectiveness of online mindfulness training programs to cope with stress among employees, especially after the Covid-19 lockdown.

Mental health in the post-lockdown pandemic phase: Relief or exacerbation of psychological distress? A cross-sectional study in the general population in Italy.

This study is one of the first aiming at investigating the mental health in the post-lockdown period in an Italian adult population and detecting demographic and psychological predictors for a worse outcome. 1401 participants answered a web-based survey including the Emotional Reaction Questionnaire (ERQ), the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), and the Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS). Simple slope analyses highlighted that women, lower age, and suppression were related to higher scores for the PANAS negative affect scale, the DASS-21, the IES-R, the GHQ, and the DUWAS. In our sample, 1.2% of participants showed depressive symptoms, 0.5% anxiety symptoms, and 2% stress symptoms. Moreover, 5.4% of participants reported post-traumatic symptoms and 15% signs of psychological distress. Compared with data on the lockdown period, our results show lower levels of depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms, possibly due to the slackening of preventive measures adopted since June. Despite this, post-traumatic symptoms and signs of psychological distress were still present. Our data suggest the necessity to monitor psychological adaption over time in general and at-risk subjects.

COVID-19 and Stressful Adjustment to Work: A Long-Term Prospective Study About Homeworking for Bank Employees in Italy.

The COVID-19 evolution has forced the massive introduction of homeworking (HW) for most employees in the initial stages of the pandemic and then return to work, mainly due to the vaccination campaign. These multiple abrupt adjustment demands in work may be a source of intense stress for office workers with consequences on wellbeing and the quality of life. This long-term prospective study aimed at investigating the effect of adaptation demands on a broad population of employees of a large Italian banking group in the job-related stress framework. We administered a web-based survey to 1,264 participants in Reopening after the first lockdown, from June to October 2020, at 841 subjects in Second Wave, corresponding to the rise of contagions from November 2020 to January 2021, and to 491 individuals in Vaccination Round, which ranged from February to June 2021. We assessed workaholism by using the Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS-10), work-family conflicting overlap by using the Work and Family Conflict Scale (WAFCS), and concern for back to work (BW) and for HW by specific questions. Higher WAFCS scores characterized Reopening and Vaccination Round while Second Wave had the highest level of concern for HW. Women and younger individuals showed the highest concern for BW, WAFCS, and DUWAS-10 scores regardless of the pandemic stage. HW days per week were related to more heightened concern for BW and lower concern for HW, DUWAS, and WAFCS scores. The number of children was related to lower Concern for BW and higher WAFCS scores in Reopening and Second Wave. Our data showed that massive adjustment demands in work and family routine represented a significant source of stress for employees, regardless of the different pandemic stages. The highest level of fatigue emerged in women and younger subjects. These results shed light on the need for a road map to promote a gradual and structured adjustment for workers and encourage organizations to consider homeworking as a valid stable alternative.

Estimating Successful Internal Mobility: A Comparison Between Structural Equation Models and Machine Learning Algorithms.

Internal mobility often depends on predicting future job satisfaction, for such employees subject to internal mobility programs. In this study, we compared the predictive power of different classes of models, i.e., (i) traditional Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), with two families of Machine Learning algorithms: (ii) regressors, specifically least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) for feature selection and (iii) classifiers, specifically Bagging meta-model with the k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN) as a base estimator. Our aim is to investigate which method better predicts job satisfaction for 348 employees (with operational duties) and 35 supervisors in the training set, and 79 employees in the test set, all subject to internal mobility programs in a large Italian banking group. Results showed average predictive power for SEM and Bagging k-NN (accuracy between 61 and 66%; F1 scores between 0.51 and 0.73). Both SEM and Lasso algorithms highlighted the predictive power of resistance to change and orientation to relation in all models, together with other personality and motivation variables in different models. Theoretical implications are discussed for using these variables in predicting successful job relocation in internal mobility programs. Moreover, these results showed how crucial it is to compare methods coming from different research traditions in predictive Human Resources analytics.

The Contribution of Shape Features and Demographic Variables to Disembedding Abilities.

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test-a proxy of disembedding abilities-in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets (i.e., those with 6 lines or more) to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far.

Firms' challenges and social responsibilities during Covid-19: A Twitter analysis.

This paper offers insights on the major issues and challenges firms face in the Covid-19 pandemic and their concerns for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) themes. To do so, we investigate large Italian firms' discussions on Twitter in the first nine months of the pandemic. Specifically, we ask: How is firms' Twitter discussion developing during the Covid-19 pandemic? Which CSR dimensions and topics do firms discuss? To what extent do they resonate with the public? We downloaded Twitter posts by the accounts of large Italian firms, and we built the bipartite network of accounts and hashtags. Using an entropy-based null model as a benchmark, we projected the information contained in the network into the accounts layers, identifying a network of accounts. We find that the network is composed of 13 communities and accounts at the core of the network focus on environmental sustainability, digital innovation, and safety. Firms' ownership type does not seem to influence the conversation. While the relevance of CSR hashtags and stakeholder engagement is relatively small, peculiarities arise in some communities. Overall, our paper highlights the contribution of online social networks and complex networks methods for management and strategy research, showing the role of online social media in understanding firms' issues, challenges, and responsibilities, with common narratives naturally emerging from data.

Enhancing Organizational Memory Through Virtual Memoryscapes: Does It Work?

Enhancing cognitive memory through virtual reality represents an issue, that has never been investigated in organizational settings. Here, we compared a virtual memoryscape (treatment) - an immersive virtual environment used by subjects as a shared memory tool based on spatial navigation - with respect to the traditional individual-specific mnemonic tool based on the "method of loci" (control). A memory task characterized by high ecological validity was administered to 82 subjects employed by large banking group. Memory recall was measured, for both groups, immediately after the task (Phase 1) and one week later (Phase 2). Results show that (i) in Phase 1, the method of loci was more efficient in terms of recalling information than the to the virtual memoryscape; (ii) in Phase 2, there was no difference. Compared to the method of loci, the virtual memoryscape presents the advantages - relevant for organizations - of being collective, controllable, dynamic, and non-manipulable.

The Relation Between Consumers' Frontal Alpha Asymmetry, Attitude, and Investment Decision.

The frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is a neurophysiological measure of motivation and preference. Despite the FAA is associated to commercial pleasantness, conflicting evidence emerged in the literature regarding its relationship with behavior. To study the association between FAA and consumers' decision, we manipulated a commercial script to elicit diverse consumers' attitudes and decisions and to evaluate whether the FAA score is associated to their final investment. A little informative script (S1) was used to polarize consumers' attitudes and investments toward unfavorable scores, while a more personalized message (S2) to elicit in customers a favorable attitude and higher investments. Twenty-one participants listened to the scripts, and their FAA, attitude, and monetary investment were measured. In S1, the FAA did not correlate with neither attitude nor the investment decision, while a robust negative correlation between these variables was found in S2. No other peripheral body and neural measures associated with attitude or final decision. Our data suggest that the FAA correlates with attitude and decision, when a commercial script is customized and provides an adequate information, likely leading the consumer to a more reasoned and planned decision-making process. When facilitating a favorable attitude toward an offer, the negative correlation of FAA and behavior may reflect the involvement of a control system, whose role is to monitor and govern possible conflicts between approach and avoidance motivations. This observation provides additional indication on the value of FAA as a marker of consumer behaviors, and how it could be affected by experimental and contextual bias.